Some poems of Carson McCullers
Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's saying the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable. Forty years later the stories and history continue.
With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.
At the beginning of Amy Tan's fourth novel, two packets of papers written in Chinese calligraphy fall into the hands of Ruth Young. One bundle is titled Things I Know Are True and the other, Things I Must Not Forget. The author? That would be the protagonist's mother, LuLing, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. In these documents the elderly matriarch, born in China in 1916, has set down a record of her birth and family history, determined to keep the facts from vanishing as her mind deteriorates.
A San Francisco career woman who makes her living by ghostwriting self-help books, Ruth has little idea of her mother's past or true identity. What's more, their relationship has tended to be an angry one. Still, Ruth recognizes the onset of LuLing's decline--along with her own remorse over past rancor--and hires a translator to decipher the packets. She also resolves to ask her mother to tell her about her life. For once, she would ask. She would listen. She would sit down and not be in a hurry or have anything else to do.
Framed at either end by Ruth's chapters, the central portion of The Bonesetter's Daughter takes place in China in the remote, mountainous region where anthropologists discovered Peking Man in the 1920s. Here superstition and tradition rule over a succession of tiny villages. And here LuLing grows up under the watchful eye of her hideously scarred nursemaid, Precious Auntie. As she makes clear, it's not an enviable setting:
I noticed the ripe stench of a pig pasture, the pockmarked land dug up by dragon-bone dream-seekers, the holes in the walls, the mud by the wells, the dustiness of the unpaved roads. I saw how all the women we passed, young and old, had the same bland face, sleepy eyes that were mirrors of their sleepy minds.
Nor is rural isolation the worst of it. LuLing's family, a clan of ink makers, believes itself cursed by its connection to a local doctor, who cooks up his potions and remedies from human bones. And indeed, a great deal of bad luck befalls the narrator and her sister GaoLing before they can finally engineer their escape from China. Along the way, familial squabbles erupt around every corner, particularly among mothers, daughters, and sisters. And as she did in her earlier The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan uses these conflicts to explore the intricate dynamic that exists between first-generation Americans and their immigrant elders. --Victoria Jenkins
This book is the dairy of a French girl who lived in the time of Napoleon Bonaparte. She was a real person. So were others who come into her story. Their names appear in the history books of Europe; but there they are dead people ----- and in Desiree's diary they are alive.
Here we can see, through a woman's eyes, how history was made. She was there. She knew the men and women who made it. She almost married Napoleon himself.
No one really understood him. Not even Desiree. She hated his wars; but she never hated the man. He has no heart, she said. And she was sorry for him, because love and peace had no place in his life. In her own life she found true love, with Jean Bernadotte. But in those days a soldier's wife had little peace, especially if her husband dared to quarrel with Napoleon.
Some people write their diaries every day. Others only write then when something important happens. Desiree's diary is of the second kind. It only covers the most important times in her life.
The first half of her story is told in this book.
Bernadottes new position now takes Desiree to the royal court of Sweden. Life there is very hard for the silk merchants daughter who almost married Napoleon in Marseilles. She is happier in Paris, even without her family. But Napoleon is still jealous of her husband. When he and Desiree meet, there is always trouble. And when war comes again, the two men are on opposite sides.
Napoleon does at last, on the island of St Helena. He had terrible faults, said Desiree. But he was my first love--- and Im not ashamed of those days in Marseilles. She goes back to Sweden and there she is crowned: the first Queen of the royal family of Bernadotte.
This is one of the greatest love stories I have ever read. … It is so beautifully written that it really takes you to another place in time and will make you ask yourself—how long could you, or would you, wait for love?
51 years,9 months, and 4 days, How long would you wait for the one you love?
Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86) is one of the most important writers of the English Ressaissance. In this book he turns his attention to the status of poetry in England.
Defense of Poetry (also known as A Defence of Poesie) — Sidney wrote the Defence before 1583. It is generally believed that he was at least partly motivated by Stephen Gosson, a former playwright who dedicated his attack on the English stage, The School of Abuse, to Sidney in 1579, but Sidney primarily addresses more general objections to poetry, such as those of Plato. In his essay, Sidney integrates a number of classical and Italian precepts on fiction. The essence of his defense is that poetry, by combining the liveliness of history with the ethical focus of philosophy, is more effective than either history or philosophy in rousing its readers to virtue. The work also offers important comments on Edmund Spenser and the Elizabethan stage.
No Country for Old Men is a 2005 novel by American author Cormac McCarthy. Set along the United States–Mexico border in 1980, the story concerns an illicit drug deal gone wrong in a remote desert location. The title comes from the poem Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats. In 2007 a film adaptation was released, winning four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Common Sense was a pamphlet written by Thomas Paine. It was first published anonymously on January 10, 1776, during the American Revolution. Common Sense presented the American colonists with an argument for independence from British rule at a time when the question of independence was still undecided. Paine wrote and reasoned in a style that common people understood; forgoing the philosophy and Latin references used by Enlightenment era writers, Paine structured Common Sense like a sermon and relied on Biblical references to make his case to the people.Historian Gordon S. Wood described Common Sense as, the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era.
Here ends 'Four Years,' written by William Butler Yeats. Four hundred copies of this book have been printed and published by Elizabeth C. Yeats on paper made in Ireland, at the Cuala Press, hurchtown, Dundrum, in the County of Dublin, Ireland. Finished on All Hallows' Eve, in the year nineteen hundred and twenty one.
O blessed and happy he, who knowing the mysteries of the gods,sanctifies his life, and purifies his soul, celebrating orgies in the mountains with holy purifications.--Euripides.
Hanrahan, that was never long in one place, was back again among the villages that are at the foot of Slieve Echtge, Illeton and Scalp and Ballylee, stopping sometimes in one house and sometimes in another, and finding a welcome in every place for the sake of the old times and of his poetry and his learning. There was some silver and some copper money in the little leather bag under his coat, but it was seldom he needed to take anything from it, for it was little he used, and there was not one of the people that would have taken payment from him. His hand had grown heavy on the blackthorn he leaned on, and his cheeks were hollow and worn, but so far as food went, potatoes and milk and a bit of oaten cake, he had what he wanted of it; and it is not on the edge of so wild and boggy a place as Echtge a mug of spirits would be wanting, with the taste of the turf smoke on it. He would wander about the big wood at Kinadife, or he would sit through many hours of the day among the rushes about Lake Belshragh, listening to the streams from the hills, or watching the shadows in the brown bog pools; sitting so quiet as not to startle the deer that came down from the heather to the grass and the tilled fields at the fall of night. . . .
WITH A NOTE CONCERNING A WALK THROUGH CONNEMARA WITH HIM
BY JACK BUTLER YEATS
Offers a glimpse of all Yeats' styles--beginning with his youthful romantic idealism and ending with his more outspoken, sardonic treatment of sexuality.
CONTENTS:
TO THE SECRET ROSE
THE CRUCIFIXION OF THE OUTCAST
OUT OF THE ROSE
THE WISDOM OF THE KING
THE HEART OF THE SPRING
THE CURSE OF THE FIRES AND OF THE SHADOWS
THE OLD MEN OF THE TWILIGHT
WHERE THERE IS NOTHING, THERE IS GOD
OF COSTELLO THE PROUD, OF OONA THE DAUGHTER OF DERMOTT, AND OF THE BITTER TONGUE.
FAR-OFF, most secret, and inviolate Rose,Enfold me in my hour of hours; where those Who sought thee in the Holy Sepulchre, Or in the wine-vat, dwell beyond the stir And tumult of defeated dreams; and deep Among pale eyelids, heavy with the sleep Men have named beauty. Thy great leaves enfold The ancient beards, the helms of ruby and gold Of the crowned Magi; and the king whose eyes Saw the pierced Hands and Rood of elder rise In Druid vapour and make the torches dim; Till vain frenzy awoke and he died; and him Who met Fand walking among flaming dew By a grey shore where the wind never blew, And lost the world and Emer for a kiss; And him who drove the gods out of their liss, And till a hundred moms had flowered red Feasted, and wept the barrows of his dead; And the proud dreaming king who flung the crown And sorrow away, and calling bard and clown Dwelt among wine-stained wanderers in deep woods: And him who sold tillage, and house, and goods, And sought through lands and islands numberless years, Until he found, with laughter and with tears, A woman of so shining loveliness That men threshed corn at midnight by a tress, A little stolen tress. I, too, await The hour of thy great wind of love and hate. When shall the stars be blown about the sky, Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die? Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows, Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose?
Inspired by Irish folklore, first published in 1892, first performed in 1899.
The sorrowful are dumb for thee--
Lament of Morion Shehone for Miss Mary Bourke
Originally published in 1892, The Countess Cathleen aroused fierce controversy when it was first performed in 1899. The play was frequently revived and almost as often revised, becoming at various points in Yeats’s career a decisive indicator of his relations with his literary and theatrical public, of his changing conception of dramatic form, and of the status of his pursuit of Maud Gonne, for whom the play was written. This volume in the Cornell Yeats reproduces the complete set of extant manuscripts preceding the play’s first publication and reassembles the extensive manuscript, proof, and authorial copy to present a crucial body of evidence of Yeats’s work and thought in drama and theater over the course of three decades.